Overcast

The overcast day always distracts me. The green outside looks a little more intense. The redness of the hibiscus deepens. There is a pensive quality to the air and to the day itself. I can sit for hours comfortable with the thoughts playing around in my head. It’s what I do best. I don’t need music to enjoy my mood – I am happy with the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind. The entire day weighs heavy with expectancy but not unpleasantly so. You don’t get days like this very often for the conditions have to be just right.

I sit next to my window and watch the sky that perfectly mirrors my soul. My soul is usually overcast or at least my mind is. The beauty beneath gets obscured by the sorrowing clouds. I have long ceased to see the blue and see only the grey. It is not a dreary unhappiness - just a subtly melancholic one. It may seem like a contradiction but it isn’t. No one can be perfectly happy. It is easier to be imperfectly happy. I take joy in some things but overshadowing it all is worry for my son’s future. It doesn’t go away and what frightens me more is my incapability. I cannot seem to help him – sometimes it appears I do not even want to try. A little centre of pain such as that can keep you from smiling your fullest smile. It’s been too long since my slender shoulders have been burdened and I cannot but wonder how his little shoulders will hold up. On days like this a certain sense of peace comes over me. A stillness where there is no expectation or thought or worry – just the satisfaction of being. The background noise of cars and people talking too loudly on their cell phones cannot detract from the essential beauty of the moment and I am calm and placid like a lake with only internal ripples.

Marketing tragedies

The current times call for marketing in all spheres of life. You could create the best work of literature in decades and no one would bother if you are unable to market it. The same goes for practically anything. You could be a mediocre cook but if you can market yourself by licking whipped cream off a spoon suggestively enough, you have arrived as a ‘domestic goddess’. Similarly if you have no product worth the name but have aggressively marketed it as the only piece of must-have software in the universe, then you are a millionaire several times over before you can blink. In short if you don’t sell it, you get nowhere – its not what you have to sell that counts, its how you go about selling it that really matters.

I think there can be no one better at selling than the Americans. They have it down pat. They can sell you their lifestyles, their non-existent history and culture (three hundred years is a mere flash in the pan), their heart-attack inducing eating habits and their germ phobic obsessions. They can make you think that they are the most important things in creation. You are pulled towards them by their unbelievable confidence in themselves as the center of the universe. You are mesmerized by their devotion to themselves and only themselves. Its kind of like a mouse being hypnotized by a cobra. You go along with it , aping their movies, their accents and their methods of making money. They are the gods and you are willing to pay obeisance. What the Americans do best, however, is market their tragedies.

They haven’t had many tragedies. They actually had more embarrassments and unnecessary wars than actual numbing, heart-rending tragedy. So for generations they have been insulated from the ugliness of the world and feel themselves above it. That could be why they were shaken up on 9/11. They were clueless about the fact that their ridiculous and short-sighted foreign policy would have led them to be attacked by the very terrorist forces that they had secretly provided arms to. They could have acknowledged their mistake and moved forward toward a real resolution. Instead they resorted to marketing. They made sure that no one would forget 9/11. It became a brand, a logo on a t-shirt, a movie , a milestone. Their dead were more important than any other country’s dead. The tens of thousands of innocent civilians who lost their lives as a result of American incursions into Iraq are of no import. Our Bhopal gas massacre (for it was not a mere tragedy but sheer carelessness) that left twenty five thousand dead and uncounted blind was of no importance either. There was no accountability – no redress of grievance – even our own courts let off the American head of Union Carbide with a playful pinch on the cheek.

In India no tragedy can be on so large a scale that we cannot forget it. Maybe we should outsource out marketing of tragedies to a U.S company – they will guarantee us a tragedy no one can forget...